Computerization at Work

by Rob Kling

This article is the
lead article for Section IV of
Computerization and Controversy:
Value Conflicts and Social Choices (2nd Ed.) by Rob
Kling. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1996.
This article may be circulated for non-commercial
purposes. Please contact Rob Kling or compare it
with the final published version before quoting
directly.

Work, Technology and Social Change

This section examines the extent to which computer-based
systems are organized to enhance or degrade the quality of
working life for clerks, administrative staff, professionals, and
managers. Worklife merits a lot of attention for four reasons.

First, work is a major component of many people's lives.
Wage income is the primary way that most people between the
ages of 22 and 65 obtain money for food, housing, clothing,
transportation, etc. The United States' population is about
260,000,000, and well over 110,000,000 work for a living. So,
major changes in the nature of work the number of jobs,
the nature of jobs, career opportunities, job content, social
relationships at work, working conditions of various kinds
can affect a significant segment of society.

Second, in the United States, most wage earners work thirty to
sixty hours per week--a large fraction of their waking lives.
And people's experiences at work, whether good or bad, can
shape other aspects of their lives as well. Work pressures or
work pleasures can be carried home to families. Better jobs
give people some room to grow when they seek more responsible,
or complex positions, while stifled careers often breed
boredom and resentment in comparably motivated people.
Although people vary considerably in what kinds of
experiences and opportunities they want from a job, few
people would be thrilled with a monotonous and socially
isolated job, even if it were to pay very well.

Third, computerization has touched more people more visibly
in their work than in any other kind of setting--home,
schools, churches, banking, and so on. Workplaces are good
places to examine how the dreams and dilemmas of
computerization really work out for large numbers of people
under an immense variety of social and technical conditions.

Fourth, many aspects of the way that people work influence
their relationships to computer systems, the practical forms of
computerization, and their effects. For example, in our last
section, Steven Hodas argued that the tenuousness of many
teachers' classroom authority could discourage them from
seeking computer-supported instruction in their classes. Also,
Martin Baily and Paul Attewell argued that computerization
has had less influence on the productivity of organizations
because people integrate into their work so as to provide other
benefits to them, such as producing more professional-looking
documents and enhancing their esteem with others, or
managers becoming counterproductive control-freaks with
computerized reports.

When specialists discuss computerization and work, they often
appeal to strong implicit images about the transformations of
work in the last one hundred years, and the role that technologies
have played in some of those changes. In nineteenth
century North America, there was a major shift from farms to
factories as the primary workplaces. Those shifts--often
associated with the industrial revolution--continued well into
the early twentieth century. Industrial technologies such as the
steam engine played a key role in the rise of industrialism.
But ways of organizing work also altered significantly. The
assembly line with relatively high-volume, low-cost production
and standardized, fragmented jobs was a critical advance in the
history of industrialization. During the last 100 years, farms
also were increasingly mechanized, with motorized tractors,
harvesters and other powerful equipment replacing horse-drawn
plows and hand-held tools. The farms also have been
increasingly reorganized. Family farms run by small groups
have been dying out, and have been bought up (or replaced
by) huge corporate farms with battalions of managers,
accountants, and hired hands.

Our twentieth century economy has been marked by the rise
of human service jobs, in areas such as banking, insurance,
travel, education, and health. And many of the earliest
commercial computer systems were bought by large service
organizations such as banks and insurance companies. (By
some estimates, the finance industries bought about 30% of
the computer hardware in the United States in the 1980s.)
During the last three decades, computer use has spread to
virtually every kind of workplace, although large firms are still
the dominant investors in computer-based systems. Since
offices are the predominant site of computerization, it is
helpful to focus on offices in examining the role that these
systems play in altering work.

Today, the management of farms and factories is frequently
supported with computer systems in their offices.
Furthermore, approximately 50% of the staff of high tech
manufacturing firms are white collar workers who make use of
such systems--engineers, accountants, marketing specialists,
etc. There is also some computerization in factory production
lines through the introduction of numerically controlled
machine tools and industrial robots. And certainly issues such
as worklife quality and managerial control are just as real on
the shop floor as in white collar areas (See Shaiken, 1986;
Zuboff, 1988). While the selections here examine white collar
work, the reader can consider the parallels between the
computerization of blue collar work and white collar work.
Many of the studies of the computerization of blue collar work
focus on factories (e.g., Noble, 1984; Shaiken, 1986; Weekley,
1983; Zuboff, 1988). Factories employ a significant fraction of
blue collar workers, but not a majority. Some of the major
blue collar occupations that are not factory jobs include bus
and truck drivers, heavy equipment operators, construction
workers, appliance repair personnel, automobile and airplane
mechanics, gas station attendants, dock workers, gardeners and
janitors. Factories have been the site of some major
computerization projects, as in the use of robots for welding
and painting and the use of numerically controlled machinery.
But many other blue collar jobs are being influenced by
computerization as well.

The Transformation of Office Work

Office work has always involved keeping records. We don't
have many detailed accounts of the earliest offices--that date
back before the Middle Ages. Today, offices with dozens of
clerks carrying out similar tasks are commonplace. Before the
twentieth century, the majority of offices were small and were
often the workplace of a single businessman or professional
who kept informal records (Delgado, 1979). The shape of
offices the way work is organized, the role of women in
their operation, the career lines, and office technologies
has been radically transformed in the last 100 years.

Novelists like Charles Dickens have written some detailed
descriptions of nineteenth century English clerks. They were
often viewed as a dull bunch of sickly men who had safe but
tedious jobs. In the nineteenth century, information was
recorded by clerks using pen and ink, and copies were also
made by hand. There were no powerful technologies for
assisting one's hand in writing, copying, or even doing
calculations. Filing systems were relatively makeshift, and
there weren't standardized sizes of forms such as 3 x 5" cards
or letter-size paper. Clerical work was a man's job, and was a
common route for learning a business and becoming a
potential owner.

In the early twentieth century, the technologies and organization
of office work underwent substantial change. Firms began
to adopt telephones and typewriters, both of which had been
recently invented. By the 1930s and 1940s, many
manufacturers devised electromechanical machines to help
manipulate, sort and tally specialized paper records automatically.
Some of the more expensive pieces of equipment, such
as specialized card-accounting machines, were much more
affordable and justifiable in organizations that centralized their
key office activities.

While new equipment was often adopted to enhance the
efficiency of offices, its use was tied to more widespread
changes in the shape of organizations: the shifts in control to
central administrators, and an increase in the number of jobs
that were mostly being filled by women. Women began to
work in offices as typewriter operators and clerks, and were
typically viewed as short- term job-holders, working between
school and marriage during their early to mid-twenties. As
larger firms hired professional managers, many aspiring
professionals turned to graduate schools rather than
apprenticeships to learn their craft. Increasingly, specialized
colleges rather than on-the-job training became the key entry
point for professional and managerial careers. And with
these careers dominated by males, clerical work became the
province of women who could not readily move into the upper
cadres of professional or managerial life.

This sketch indicates some of the key themes that permeate
discussions of computerization and the quality of worklife:
how efficient and flexible work will be, who controls the work
that is done and how it is organized, how work is divided by
gender, and who shares in the benefits of technological and
organizational change.

Businesses such as insurance companies and banks, along with
public agencies, adopted computer-based information systems
on a large scale in the 1960s. Many of the early digital
computer systems replaced electromechanical paper-card
systems. The earliest systems were designed for batch
operation. Clerks filled in paper forms with information about
a firm's clients, and the forms were then periodically sent to a
special group of keypunchers to translate the data onto
cardboard cards. These "Hollerith cards" each stored one line
of data, up to 80 characters. They were punched with a series
of holes for each character or number. Keypunch machines
were clanky devices with a typewriter-style keyboard, a bin for
storing blank cards, and a holder for the card being punched.
There was no simple way for a keypunch operator to correct
an error. Cards containing errors (e.g., a letter "s" instead of
an "a") had to be completely repunched. The punched cards
were then taken to a data-processing department for a weekly
or monthly "run", during which time records were updated and
reports were produced. Errors often took a few cycles--sometimes
weeks or months--to identify and correct. Using
these early computerized systems required immense precision
and care, since inaccuracies were detected and corrected very
slowly. In addition, the data from one information system
were usually formatted in a way that did not make them
accessible to other systems. Professionals and managers often
waited a few months for a new kind of report, and reports that
required merging data from several separate systems were
often viewed as prohibitively complex, time-consuming, and
expensive to create. The earliest computer systems were
speedier than the hand in processing large volumes of highly
specialized transactions. But they were also very rigid and
cumbersome for many people who used them.

Furthermore, the transaction-processing and report-generating
programs were usually written by specialized programmers who
were organized into specialized data-processing departments.
Often, the large specialized computer systems, their operators,
and their programmers were all located in basement offices--isolating
them from organizational life. During the last 25
years, most organizations have reorganized their computer-based
information systems to be more responsive and flexible,
and to support a richer array of organizational activities.
Terminals connected to shared data-bases or microcomputers
are commonplace in today's organizations.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, virtually every organization
bought PCs and workstations. But "the PC revolution" did not
just change the nature of office equipment--it expanded the
range of people who use computers routinely to include a
much larger fraction of professionals (who are often men)--managers
of all kinds, architects, accountants, lawyers, and so
on. Many larger organizations are beginning to use
computerized communication systems--like electronic mail--to
help managers and professionals keep in contact when they
are out of the office. And a few organizations are
experimenting with pushing some of their staff out of regular
offices and creating "virtual offices" in locations closer to their
clients, their homes, and other more convenient (and less
costly) locations.

In the last decade many larger organizations have been
restructuring work. Some analysts tout these restructurings as
byproducts of computerization. But many of these changes are
often unrelated to computerization. For example, in the early
1990s many top managers have restructured their organizations
so as to eliminate layers of managers below them
("delayering"). Some analysts argue that the use of electronic
mail and computerized reporting systems has enabled this
flattening of corporate hierarchies. But I have seen such
thinning of middle management in corporations that make
relatively little use of electronic mail. If organizations can
delayer without the use of e-mail, why would we believe that
e-mail plays a key role in delayering?

Similarly, in the recent United States recession many
organizations have laid off numerous workers, and the
remaining staff often work much harder and much longer
hours. It's not clear whether computerization has any
significant influence on this pattern. Last, many organizations
have restructured their employment contracts so that they have
a much larger fraction of readily dispensable part-time and/or
temporary employees than before the recent recession. This
approach has created fewer full-time jobs with good career
opportunities in specific organizations, and is probably
unrelated to computerization.

Today, the typical clerk, professional or manager is much more
likely to use a variety of powerful computer systems than
would her counterpart ten and certainly fifteen years ago. But
have jobs improved in a way that is commensurate with the
technical improvement in computer systems? That is a key
question which we will examine from several vantage points in
this section.

Gender, Work and Information Technology

It may seem strange to begin a discussion of computerization
and work with gender, when the common terms of computer
use--such as "computer user" and interface--seem to be so
gender neutral. But finding ways to talk about people's
identities can help us understand computerization more
deeply.

Discussions of women and computing often focus on clerical
work because about one-third of the women in the work force
are clerks. Conversely, about 80% of the 20 million clerks in
the United States in 1993 were women. Women work in every
occupation from janitors to ambassadors for the federal
government, but they are not equally represented in the higher
status and better paid professions. Less than 30% of the
nation's 1.3 million programmers and systems analysts were
women in 1993. But the nation's 16.1 million female clerks
vastly outnumbered the nation's 412,000 female programmers
and systems analysts in 1993. Female computer users today
are more likely to be clerks who processes transactions, such
as payroll, inventory, airline reservations, than to be
information and computer professionals.

In the first selection, Suzanne Iacono and I examine how the
dramatic improvements in office technologies over the past
100 years have sometimes made many clerical jobs much more
interesting, flexible and skill-rich. But we also observe that
these changes, especially those involving increased skill
requirements, have not brought commensurate improvements
in career opportunities, influence, or clerical salaries. We
examine the actual changes in clerical work that have taken
place over the last 100 years, from the introduction of the first
typewriters through whole generations of office equipment--mechanical
accounting machines, telephones, and
photocopiers. Each generation of equipment has made certain
tasks easier. At the same time, clerical work shifted from a
predominantly male occupation, which provided an entry route
to higher levels of management, to a predominantly female
occupation that has been ghettoized. We criticize some of the
technological utopians, such as Giuliano (1982), by arguing
that a new generation of integrated computer-based office
systems will not automatically alter the pay, status, and careers
of clerks without explicit attention. Further, we argue that
computerization is a continuous processes which doesn't stop
when a new kind of equipment is acquired (Also see Kling
and Iacono, 1989, Zmuidzinas, Kling and George, 1990).

These observations become more meaningful because the vast
majority of working women are still concentrated in a few
occupations, despite the growing numbers of women who have
entered the professions and management in the last two
decades (Reskin and Padavic, 1994). About 80% of the
clerical workers in the United States in 1993 were women. In
contrast, about 42% the executives and managers and 53% of
the professionals were women. However, women professionals
were clustered in nursing, social work, library jobs, and school
teaching. For example, 75% of school teachers were women
while less than 20% of architects were women. In 1988 only
30% of employed computer scientists and 10% of employed
doctoral-level computer scientists were women (Pearl, et. al.,
1990) and the percentages have not changed substantially since
then.

The way that clerical work is computerized affects at 16
million working women in the United States . But men often
believe that much of the work done in female work groups is
trivial and can be readily automated. The problems in
effectively computerizing such seemingly routine work that
can, in fact, require managing subtle complexities of work
processes actually effects a much larger number of people--both
inside and outside the targeted work group. This idea is
developed in Lucy Suchman's article, "Supporting Articulation
Work," which I will discuss in more detail later in this
introduction.

Information Technology and New Ways of
Organizing Work

An important aspect of worklife is the issue of who controls
the way that work is organized, the way that people
communicate, and workers' levels of skills. In the 1980s, many
professionals became enamored with microcomputers. They
became the new electronic typewriter for writers of all kinds.
Engineers set aside their slide rules and electronic calculators
for software that mechanized their calculations and produced
graphical data displays. Accountants helped drive the demand
for microcomputers with their passion for computerized
spreadsheets. And so on. Many professionals became hooked
on the relative ease and speed of their computer tools, and
dreaded any return to manual ways of working. They often
adopted and adapted computers to their work in ways that
enhanced their control over their work products. Work still
remained labor intensive, since the working week did not
diminish in length. Work sometimes became more fun, or at
least less tedious.

In Giuliano's (1982) account, managers organized "industrial
age" offices for efficiency, and will organize "information-age"
offices in a way that enhances the quality of jobs as well. But
some observers argue that managers will not give up substantial
control to their subordinates. Andrew Clement, for
example, argues that the close monitoring of employee
behavior represents the logical extension of a dominant
management paradigm--pursuit of control over all aspects of
the business enterprise. Indeed some believe that to manage
is to control. ". . . [M]anagement may be called 'the profession
of control'" (Clement, 1984:10).

Some authors argue that the industrialization of clerical work
sets the stage for the industrialization of professional work as
well. In "The Social Dimensions of Office Automation" Abbe
Mowshowitz summarizes his sharp vision in these concise
terms:

Our principal point is that the lessons of the factory
are the guiding principles of office automation. In
large offices, clerical work has already been transformed
into factory-like production systems. The
latest technology--office automation--is simply
being used to consolidate and further a well-established
trend. For most clerical workers, this spells an
intensification of factory discipline. For many
professionals and managers, it signals a gradual loss
of autonomy, task fragmentation and closer supervision--courtesy
of computerized monitoring.
Communication and interaction will increasingly be
mediated by computer. Work will become more
abstract . . . and opportunities for direct social
interaction will diminish (Mowshowitz, 1986).

Some analysts have hoped that new computer communication
technologies, such as electronic mail, would enable workers to
bypass rigid bureaucratic procedures (e.g., Hiltz and Turoff,
1978:142). Some analysts have found that electronic mail can
give groups more ability to develop their own culture (Finholt
and Sproull, 1990). And some have hoped that electronic mail
would reduce the barriers to communication between people
at different levels of hierarchy in an organization. But the
evidence is mixed. Zuboff (1988) reports an interesting case
that can dim these unbridled enthusiasms and lead us to ask
under what conditions they are most likely to occur. In a large
drug company she studied, managers claimed that their
communications to electronic groups were often treated as
policy statements, even when they wanted to make an informal
observations or ad-hoc decisions. Further, when a group of
about 130 professional women formed a private women's
conference, male managers felt threatened, upper managers
discouraged women from participating, and soon many
participants dropped out (Zuboff, 1988:382-383).

I suspect that electronic communications systems are most
likely to facilitate the formation of groups that upper managers
deem to be safe, except in those special organizations--like
universities and R&D labs--where there are strong norms
against censorship. The controversy between technological
utopians who see technologies as improving human and
organizational behavior and those who see social systems as
changing slowly in response to other kinds of social and
economic forces will not be resolved by one or two case
studies. But the cases are instructive to help focus the debate
about what is possible and the conditions under which
computer systems of specific kinds alter social life.

In "The Case of the Omniscient Organization," sociologist
Gary Marx reports the behavior of a hypothetical company,
Dominion-Swann (DS). The article, which is written as an
excerpt from DS's 1995 Employee Handbook was originally
published in the Harvard Business Review, a premier
management magazine, in 1990 as the springboard for a
discussion about information technology and management
practices. The DS case is constructed as a technologically
anti-utopian narrative (see Section II). But it also illustrates the
power of well crafted utopian or anti-utopian narratives to
highlight significant social choices. Marx crafted the DS case to
illustrate how a business firm could develop a tight system of
social control by partly relying upon relatively unobtrusive
information technologies. However, the DS's 1995 Employee
Handbook characterizes each form of control as either
inoffensive or actually in employee's best interests. In effect,
DS has created an totally encompassing electronic prison in
which virtually every aspects of an employee's behavior is
continually monitored. Simultaneously, DS's 1995 Employee
Handbook characterizes the company as a homelike
community, where employees feel so comfortable with DS and
each other, that continual monitoring of work practices, health,
and social relations is simply a cozy part of everyday life. Marx
has brilliantly portrayed the contradictions of some
contemporary corporate cultures. DS would appear as hellish
to an ardent individualist like William Whyte (See
Introduction to Section III).

While Marx's portrait of DS can outrage and even terrify some
people, it's not automatically true that a firm like DS would
have trouble finding willing employees. North American
society is very diverse, and many people live out social
practices that would offend others in their own communities.
And many firms have increased the extent to which they
monitor some aspects of their employees work. Today, most of
the monitoring focuses on measures of work, but some
organizations also tap phone calls or eavesdrop on
conversations between co-workers (Kadaba, 1993). A few
organizations are even experimenting with "active badges" that
would enable others to learn of their whereabouts at any time
(Kling, 1993). The next selection "Mr. Edens Profits from
Watching His Workers' Every Move" by Tony Horwitz
describes a small financial services firm whose boss observes
his employees by sitting behind their desks. Mr. Edens'
techniques for having his employees work intensively by
prohibiting them from looking at the window or conversing are
very simple. But the fact that many people desperate for some
kind of stable job will work for Mr. Edens suggests that
employers that used techniques like Gary Marx's DS would
also find willing employees.

In 1991, Grant and Higgens reported an empirical study about
the effectiveness and repercussions of monitoring the activities
of service workers, such as those who audit insurance claims.
They studied a group of existing companies, none of which
were as finely wired as the hypothetical DS. Grant and
Higgens developed a rich, multidimensional concept of
monitoring that includes features such as the granularity of
data (i.e., amount of work per minute, hour, day or week) , the
different types of data collected (i.e., work completed, error
rates, customer complaints, nature of tasks), and the variety of
people who routinely see data about a person's work (i.e.,
oneself, one's supervisor, one's peers, and/or upper managers).
They found that many people did not object to computerized
monitoring. And in a few cases, some people liked their work
to be measured to help demonstrate how productive they
actually were. But they also found that monitoring does not
always improve performance and the quality of service. For
example, extensive monitoring discouraged some people from
being willing to help their co-workers with problems or work
crunches. In fact, service seemed to degrade most when many
aspects of performance were monitored and made available to
supervisors. Grant and Higgens view monitoring as a legitimate
but subtle form of managerial intervention that can often
backfire when system designers and managers do not pay close
attention to people's indirect responses to monitoring.

Control Over the Location of Work

It is possible for managers to work with several competing
logics. They may be concerned with maintaining some control
over their subordinates time and pay, but also with allowing
sufficient flexibility and self-direction to insure good quality
work and retain good employees. In fact, some organizations
try to pay less by offering attractive working conditions. One of
the interesting possibilities of computerized work work at
home seems to have gotten stalled because of dilemmas
of workplace control. Many self employed people work at
home. Futurists like Alvin Toffler have been specially excited
by the possibilities that people who normally commute to a
collective office could elect to work at home. In The Third
Wave, Toffler portrayed homes with computer and
communications equipment for work as "electronic cottages".

A recent report developed under the auspices of the Clinton
administration included a key section, "Promoting
Telecommuting," that lists numerous advantages for
telecommuting (IITF, 1994). These include major
improvements in air quality from reduced travel; increased
organizational productivity when people can be more alert
during working hours faster commercial transit times when few
cars are on the roads; and improvements in quality or worklife.
The benefits identified in this report seem so overwhelming
that it may appear remarkable that most organizations have
not already allowed all of their workers the options to work at
home.

Forester (1989) critiqued the visions of full-time work at home
via telecommuting as a romantic preference. After coming to
appreciate the social isolation reported by several people who
worked at home full time, he speculates that many analysts
who most enthusiastically champion full time work at home
with computing have never done it themselves. There have
been several published studies of the pros and cons of firms
giving their employees computer equipment to use at home
while communicating with their shared offices via electronic
mail (Kraemer & King, 1982; Olson, 1989; Huws, Korte, and
Robinson, 1990). Some analysts hoped that work at home will
decrease urban congestion during computer hours, give parents
more opportunity for contact with young children, and allow
people to spend more time in their neighborhoods. However,
people who work a substantial fraction of the time at home
may be unavailable for meetings, may be less visible to their
peers and (therefore) passed over for promotions, and may be
difficult to supervise unless they work on a piece-rate system.
And some employees may lack sufficient self-discipline for
work at home.

Many popular accounts focus on the way that home can be a
less distracting place to work than the collective office. Homes
are different kinds of places to work than offices.
Homeworkers report a different set of attractions and
distractions at home: sociable neighbors may expect to be able
to drop in any time; the refrigerator may beckon others too
frequently; a spouse who works in an office may expect the
partner at home to cook dinner nightly, the child who comes
home from school at 3PM may want immediate attention, and
so on. Some parents choose to work at home because they can
spend time with their babies and pre-school children, but they
often get much less done than at their collective offices.
Olson's (1989) study of full time work at home by computer
professionals exemplifies some of the empirical studies. She
found reduced job satisfaction, reduced organizational
commitment and higher role conflict in her sample. She also
wonders whether work-at-home practices can exacerbate
workaholism.

A few firms, such as IBM and Chiat/Day, have conducted pilot
tests of the telecommuting and "virtual offices" (Kindel, 1993;
Sprout, 1994; Taylor, 1994). And the members of a few
occupations, such as journalists, professors, salesmen, and
accountants often take notebook computers on the road when
they travel. But the vast majority of firms keep their office-bound
work force keystroking in the office rather than at
home. Some workers are given computer equipment to use
for unpaid overtime work. To date, however, no large firms
have dispersed a large fraction of their full-time work force to
their homes to work with computer systems.

It seems that the desire to maintain control underlies many
managers' fears of having their employees work full-time at
home. It is much easier for managers to be sure that their
subordinates are putting in a fair day's work in an office from
nine to five (sometimes called "face work"), than to develop
and monitor subtle contracts about the amount of work
("deliverables") to be produced each week or month.

Anthropologist Connie Perin adds an interesting insight about
the complexities of off-site work after interviewing about 150
managers and professional employees in a variety of
occupations, all organizationally employed, full-time workers
in several United States industries. She found that

Field-based employees typically complain of their
"isolation" from a central office which "never
understands" the conditions of their work--that lack
of empathy or interest represents a fundamental
negativism toward office absence. Those not
working in a central office may be regarded as
quasi-employees, similar to contract, part-time, or
temporary employees within the organization ....
Overall, both physical and social distance,
independent of all other considerations, attenuates
organizational legitimization and managerial trust
(Perin, 1991).

Electronic mail seems to give greater visibility to people who
work at home (Sproull and Kiesler, 1991). But the technology
only facilitates communication, and effective communication
requires additional skills and attention. And there may be
some subtle gender biases in electronic discussion groups
(Herring, 1993). Some telecommuters have gone as far as
making videos of their homes to show their supervisors their
working conditions.

In addition, some people find social and technological
attractions to working in a group office. A shared office is
often populated with people to chat or go to lunch with,
especially when it is compared with the typical isolating
suburban neighborhood where many telecommuters live. In
addition, organizations usually provide better computer
equipment, including higher-speed computer networks and
faster laser printers in shared offices than in their employees'
homes. Last, today's computer equipment is still relatively
clumsy and occasionally unreliable. It is much easier to get
meaningful help from a colleague who can see one's work, or
even from a technical support person at the office, than by
explaining subtle problems over a telephone. Any of these
patterns could be altered, but they each require changing many
conventions of organizational life and neighborhood
organization.

I am discouraged when I read a government report like
"Promoting Telecommuting" (IITF, 1994). It is infused with a
decent enthusiasm for "doing the right thing," but fails to come
to terms with many of the significant institutional issues that
inhibit significant telecommuting. Conceptually, it relies upon
rational systems models of organizations rather than the
natural systems models of organizations that I briefly explained
in "The Centrality of Organizations in the Computerization of
Society." The report encourages Federal agencies to take the
lead in creating telecommuting programs with their employees,
especially in large metro areas with substantial air pollution.
And it will be interesting to see whether these pilot projects
scale up to include a significant work force and if they are
sustainable.

It is still an open question whether many organizations will
allow substantial fractions of their work force to work at home
with computing part time (one to three days a week), for
reasons of personal flexibility or to facilitate regional
transportation plans. Few homes are designed for significant
home offices, and there are many important questions about
the pros and cons of part time work-at-home with computing
(and fax) for those who prefer this option.

New Forms of Work Organization

This article began with the controversies about the ways that
computerization changes the organization of work. This debate
used traditional forms of regimented assembly lines as a major
reference point. Another related controversy is the extent to
which new computing technologies, especially those that
support communications open up new forms of work. Does
electronic mail eliminate organizational hierarchies and
facilitate the formation of flexible (virtual) work groups? Do
new forms of computerization create novel possibilities for
organizational learning (Zuboff, 1991)?

There are few empirical studies that support these
speculations, and the existing evidence is mixed. In one
intriguing study, Tom Finholt and Lee Sproull (1990) found
that electronic mail can give groups more ability to develop
their own culture. Others argue that electronic mail reduces
the barriers to communication between people at different
levels of hierarchy in an organization (Sproull and Kiesler,
1991).

The controversy about the possibility of computerization
fostering new forms of work organization is very engaging.
Enthusiasts of the position that computerization can lead to
new forms of work have the advantage of offering exciting
possibilities. However, they rarely face the issues of workplace
and support systems for technical work. When they ignore
recurrent themes from previous eras of computerization, they
risk being blindsided by perennial issues in new guises (Kling
and Jewett, 1994).

The Design and Routine Use of Computerized
Technologies

The Integration of Computing into Work

The vast majority of articles and books about computerization
and work are written as if computer systems are highly reliable
and graceful instruments. There are relatively few published
studies of the ways that people actually use software systems in
their work--which features do they use, to what extent do
they encounter problems with systems or gaps in their own
skills, how do they resolve problems when difficulties arise,
how does the use of computerized systems alter the coherence
and complexity of work?

There does not seem to be single simple answers to these
questions. Some organizations computerize some jobs so as to
make them as simple as possible. An extreme example is the
way that fast food chains have computerized cash registers
with special buttons for menu items like cheeseburgers and
malts so that they can hire clerks with little math skill. Kraut,
Dumais, and Koch (1989) report a case study of customer
service representatives in which simplifying work was a major
consequence of computerization.

But it is common for images of simplification to dominate talk
about computerization, regardless of the complexity of systems.
Clement (1990) reports a case of computerization for
secretaries in which managers characterized new systems as
"super typewriters" which didn't require special training; they
were very mistaken. Many of the popular "full featured" PC
software packages for text processing, spreadsheets, and
databases include hundreds of features. Narratives which focus
on the capabilities of systems usually suggest that people can
readily have all the advantages that all the features offer;
actual behavior often differs from these expectations. Most
people who use these powerful programs seem to learn only a
small fraction of the available capabilities--enough to do their
most immediate work. Moreover, it is increasingly common for
many workers to use multiple computer systems, often with
conflicting conventions, further complicating people's ability to
"use computer systems to their fullest advantage." Some of
these dilemmas can be resolved when organizations adopt
relatively uncomplicated systems, train their staffs to use them,
and provide consulting for people who have questions.
However, many managers believe that supporting computer
use with training and consulting is too expensive. Training is
not cheap; an organization may pay $500 in labor time for a
professional to learn to use a package that costs $150 to
purchase.

I vividly remember a research administrator of a major food
processing firm who was using a popular and powerful
spreadsheet to budget projects. He wanted to print out reports
in different fonts, such as printing budget categories in larger
bolder print. But he was puzzled how to do this. He knew that
"it could be done" because he saw such a report in an
advertisement. He treated his ignorance as a personal failing.
He would have had to learn his spreadsheet's macro facility to
produce this effect, and there was no clue in his manual about
the appropriate strategy. In some organizations he might have
turned to an information center with skilled consultants. But
in his organization, the PC consultants were already
overworked just installing new PCs and had no time to train
users or consult on software use. This was not a critical
problem for the manager. But it is indicative of the way that
many organizations expect white collar workers to learn to
effectively use computer systems on their own, with little
support besides limited manuals and advice from co-workers.
Most computer systems do not work perfectly, further
complicating what users have to learn and how they integrate
systems into their work (see Kling and Scacchi, 1979; Gasser,
1986; Clement 1990).

The selection by Poltrock and Grudin goes behind the scenes
of a major software development firm to examine the way that
software is designed and built in practice. They describe
published principles of software development, such of those of
John Gould, that emphasize close contact with the people
who will actually use a software package (or surrogates) at all
stages of design and testing. But they observe an odd
contradiction in the practical work of many software
developers. Many software developers claim that these
principles are obvious, but they rarely follow them in practice.
Poltrock and Grudin's study examines how such a
contradiction can happen in practice. It could be that software
developers behave like those of us who know that we should
always balance our checkbooks, but often let it slip when we're
busy. Their case study examines how computer scientists who
were designing CAD software work within a structured
organization. They are not autonomous masters of their own
designs. People in other departments also play key roles in
shaping the resulting product. In this case, the marketing
department was able to seize the role as the group that would
speak for people who would use the CAD system. They quote
one software engineer, who noted:

I think it would be worthwhile if all developers
would spend maybe a couple of hours a year seeing
how the product is used by those customers. Just
watching them. And while they're watching them the
customer would say, I don't like the way this works,
and noting those things.... You need to see how they
use it. You need to understand, first of all, what
they're doing. So you need them to give you a little
background, and then watch how they accomplish it,
and see the totality of it, especially. How they fire
up, the whole structure of their day. And then use
that information to give you a global sense of how to
help them out. You can't help them without
understanding how they work."

This comment poignantly portrays the isolation of many
software designers for whom spending just "a couple of hours
a year" with their customers would be a major improvement in
their abilities to develop higher quality software.

In the next selection, MIS Professor Christine Bullen and John
Bennett (then employed by IBM) follow this advice. They
examine the ways that people actually integrate computer
systems to support collaborative work in groups (groupware)
into their work. They report how several work groups have
attempted to use some of today's best commercially available
groupware systems with mixed results. Their informants often
report that they value the electronic mail features of these
systems as most important, even though each of these systems
has many other advertised features. But many groups have
found other features hard to use routinely, or simply not worth
the effort. (Also see Grudin, 1989).

More significantly, Bullen and Bennett report that many
groups slowly learned that they would have to reorganize their
work in order to take best advantage of their groupware. For
example, the usage of electronic calendars to schedule
meetings requires that all participants keep detailed calendars
up to date on the computer system, even if they often spend
much of their days out of the office. Many managers and
professionals hope that they can computerize effectively by
installing appropriate equipment, rather than by reorganizing
work when they (re)computerize. Bullen and Bennett make a
provocative attempt to characterize those groups which are
high performers: they are not always the most computerized.
They argue that group members and their managers have
worked hard to create work environments which have "clear
elevating goals," and which support and reward commitment.
These groups have developed effective social systems with
coherent goals and related rewards as well as adopting
technologies which might help improve their performance.

There is considerable unpublished controversy about this kind
of analysis, since many technologists and computer vendors try
to convince computer using organizations that appropriate new
technologies alone will improve working styles and
organizational effectiveness. During the 1990s interesting
technologies such as expert systems, groupware and graphical
interfaces will be written about by technologists and journalists
as if they can significantly improve the ways that people work
without requiring important changes in the way that groups
organize their work. Careful studies of work with new
computing technologies, like Bullen and Bennett's study,
suggests that new technologies alone are unlikely to be magic
potions which can automatically improve work just by
appearing in a workplace. (Also see Jewett and Kling, 1990).

Social Design of Computerized Systems and Work Settings

An exciting recent development is the effort by some
researchers and practitioners to conceptualize the design of
computer and networked systems as a set of interrelated
decisions about technology and the organization of work.
Managers and professionals who focus on the use of
computing may find that this approach fits their routine
practices. But thinking and talking about computerization as
the development of socio-technical configurations rather than
as simply installing and using a new technology is not
commonplace.

Many professionals use computer technologies which expand
the range of their work methods. The adoption of electronic
mail to facilitate communication between people who work in
different time zones and the acquisition of compact portable
computers to facilitate working on the road are two routine
illustrations. But organizations that adopt portable computers
and e-mail to improve the flexibility of people's work
relationships must do more than simply acquire technologies to
realize these specific advantages. For example, portable
computers may help people work outside of their offices. Some
of the resulting convenience hinges on technological choices,
such as acquiring machines which run software whose files are
compatible with file formats used in the office. But much of
the resulting flexibility depends upon social choices as well.
For example, if organization A requires men and women to
report to work daily during regular working hours even when
they have the portable computers, then people gain relatively
little flexibility in work location if that policy is not also
changed. People may be able to take portable computers home
after hours or on weekends, or on the road while they travel.
Thus, organization A may gain some unpaid overtime work
with these policies. But the men and women who work in
organization A will not gain much of the "control over the
location of work" which people many attribute to portable
computing. In contrast, if organization B allows its employees
to work at places and times which they choose, then its
employees can use portable computing to have even more
flexibility in their work. In each of these cases, the men and
women who adopt the equipment and construct work policies
and practices for organizations A and B have created distinct
socio-technical configurations--or social designs. And these
social designs which incorporate portable computing, rather
than the technology alone, have different consequences.

Social Organization of Work

The division of labor.

Rewards/demands for learning new systems.

Access to machines and data.

Equipment Access

Shared vs. independent systems

Who has access and with what privileges

Standardization of systems and capabilities

Extensiveness of use within a work group or organization

Infrastructure

Training programs

Availability of Adjunct Resources (e.g., space)

Control Patterns

Implementation strategy and operations

Daily working conditions

Levels of monitoring

TABLE 1: SOME ELEMENTS OF A SOCIAL DESIGN

Analytical research about computerization in organizations, as
well as our own systematic observations, has helped identify
many arenas in which organizational participants make social
choices about the socio-technical configurations of their
computerized and networked systems (Jewett and Kling, 1990;
Jewett and Kling, 1991; Kling, 1992; Bikson and Law, 1993;
Markus, 1994). The term "social design of computerized
systems," or "social design," characterizes the joint design of
both the technological characteristics of a computerized
systems and the social arrangements under which it will be
used (Kling, 1987a; Kling and Jewett, 1994). Table #1 lists
several common social dimensions which can be part of the
social design of a computing or network system.

The social design of work systems with computing does not
necessarily improve the quality of peoples' work lives. For
example, some managers have computerized relatively
routinized clerical work by fragmenting jobs and tightening
supervisors' abilities to monitor the quality, pace and speed of
people's work. These same managers may develop good
systematic training programs for the clerks whose work is now
more regimented. However, social design can also be very
benign. It encourages participants in a computerization project
to review the web of practices and policies related to
computing which can otherwise be "unanticipated."

Two of the major approaches to social design contrast strongly
in their assumptions about people, organizations, technology
and work. Business Process Reengineering is usually applied by
managers and consultants to streamline operations (Hammer,
1990; Hammer and Champy, 1993; Davenport, 1993). The
main aims of these reengineering projects seem to be reducing
the time for a specific business process, such as dispatching a
repairman to a site or processing an insurance claim, and also
reducing the number of people who work on that activity.
However, some consultants have promised more diverse
financial benefits to their clients (and potential clients).

David Schnitt (1993) characterizes a business process in these
terms:

A business process is best defined as an activity in the
organization fundamental to operating the business that
serves an internal or external customer and has a
well-defined outcome or series of outcomes. Every
organization is made up of business processes. Examples
include such mundane activities as accounts payable,
inventory control, field service, or the processing of a
customer application .... Since many work steps in
business processes are executed by people in different
departments, this view encourages a cross-functional
perspective....the business process view of the Accounts
Payable (A/P) process sheds new light on it as a
complicated, slow, error-prone process involving many
different departments and personnel. It reveals that the
process is really the procurement process, not just A/P.
Seen from this perspective, the opportunities for
improvement are much greater. The key is to focus on the
value-added outcome of the process (why it is done, not
what is done) and how it relates to other processes in the
organization. (Schnitt, 1993)

Business process reengineering brings an industrial engineering
perspective to the design of organizations and work. The flow
of documents and authorizations are key elements, and the
character of people's jobs is a secondary consideration in much
of the writing about this approach to redesigning
organizations. Computer systems of various kinds are often key
elements of a reengineering project, including scanners and
document processing systems at the "front end" of a process,
and the use of workflow software to model and mange some of
the subsequent activity.

The analyses which support these projects usually rest on
Rational systems models of organizations to examine
workflows that run across departments. They usually examine
few influences on worklife and work organization other than
those that directly pertain to reliable and efficient workflows.

The major alternative approach, sometimes called
socio-technical systems design, makes people and their
relationships in support of work, rather than workflows, the
center of organizational reforms with information technology
(Johnson & Rice, 1987; Zuboff, 1988; Pava, 1983). Peter Keen
(1991) articulates this approach in these terms:

The business team, rather than the functionally defined
hierarchy or the dotted-line or matrix-management
variants that show up on the organization chart, is
increasingly being seen as the real unit of organizing.
Business is finally recognizing that division of labor is
increasingly ineffective as the basis for an organization in
an environment of constant rather than occasional change
and of shifting functions to the proven project and
team-based processes long employed by the research and
technical functions. Teamwork is relational; the quality of
performance rests on the quality of interactions,
communication, and coordination among team
members....
Instead of focusing on organization structure,
business today needs to look at the mechanisms that
make communication simple, flexible...IT makes
practical many of the visions of management
thinkers. The management principles for exploiting
IT organizational advantage require a basic
rethinking of old assumptions--especially concerning
the links between strategy and structure--at the top
of the firm.

Flexibility and adaptability are the new watchwords for
organizations and for people. Firms that do not attend to
their people's careers as well as their jobs might well have
to replace much of their work force. Their human capital
will be a depreciated resource, one they may find harder
to replenish than they thought (Keen 1991).

Keen's analysis appeals to many professionals. One
technologically oriented corollary leads some computer
scientists to develop designs for computer systems which
facilitate communication and collaboration in diverse forms:
mail systems, conferencing systems, co-authoring systems, and
so on (Kling, 1991a). But it is much too facile to think that
lower status workers, such as clerks and semi-professionals are
most appropriately targeted with business process
reengineering while only higher status workers, such as
managers and professionals, can bask in a more supportive and
enriched relational organization.

For example, Jim Euchner and Patricia Sachs (1993) recently
reported the redesign of a "work system" in which a regional
United States phone company (NYNEX) provided customers
with high speed (T.1) phone service. The installation required
the collaboration of over 40 people in five distinct departments
(Corcoran, 1992). NYNEX took much longer to complete
these installations than their competitors, and rapidly lost
significant market share in New York City. A computerized
scheduling system had been used to assign different
technicians to their specialized activities in the installation and
fine-tuning of the T.1 lines in customers' offices. A large part
of the delay seemed to derive from the way that some key
problems cut across the domains of different technicians--they
were either problems at system interfaces, or problems
whose causes were somewhat ambiguous. The computer system
helped to efficiently schedule the technicians' trips to the site--one
at a time--to give them full and balanced workloads. It
did not help bring together the specific technicians who would
be needed to solve the more vexing installation problems.

A group from NYNEX's Science and Technology Center
collaborated in a socio-technical design with both the craft
workers and managers who were responsible for T.1
installations to develop a new "work system design." Some of
the principles of work system design that they articulated are
common themes in many socio-technical systems projects. For
example, they had craft workers who do the actual work, as
well as more senior managers, design the new work system
and implement it. They focussed on workflows and whole
processes rather than upon discrete tasks, a concept which is
shared with many business process reengineering projects.
However, they sought to provide people with ownership and
responsibility for whole jobs, rather than discrete tasks. And
they developed some specific guidelines for designing
computer and communication systems: to support workflows
and communications; to provide "intelligent" information
handling; and to have interfaces that match the language in
which people conceptualize their work.

The new T.1 work system reorganized the installations around
cross-functional teams who have joint responsibility for
insuring that installations are prompt and effective. The
team's composition is rather fluid and can depend upon the
specific customer and the stage of the installation. But they
usually mix both white collar and blue collar workers, and can
include people at different managerial levels. The coordination
relies upon people scheduling technicians rather than upon
computerized scheduling, although computer support is
provided for other activities. In this particular case, the work
system was redesigned, while the existing computer systems
were left untouched.

Jewett and Kling (1990) report the case of a pharmaceutical
firm in which sales managers radically restructured the
responsibilities of sales clerks from passive order-takers to be
more proactive sales representatives. The department held
extensive meetings to reconceptualize their roles, and the staff
rewrote all of the job descriptions. The resulting jobs were
enriched and also reclassified at somewhat higher pay levels.
The department's managers also commissioned the
development of a new computerized information system to
provide richer searching capabilities to support the
restructured jobs. In this case, the configuration of the
information systems was part of a larger social design which
included the explicit reconceptualization of key jobs. (Also see
Chapter 4 of Levering, 1988.)

These socio-technical strategies require that systems analysts
and designers understand many of the work practices,
schedules, resource constraints, and other contingencies of the
people who will use the new computerized systems. Some
organizations, such as NYNEX, have included social scientists
on their design teams to facilitate such observation and
understanding. They also recommend that people who use the
systems have a substantial role in specifying their designs as
well as altered work practices. One reason that stand-alone
microcomputers may have been so attractive for many people
is that they offered more control over the form of
computerization and changes in work than systems which ran
on shared computer systems. In addition, microcomputer users'
work methods made them less dependent upon having access
to busy full time computer professionals to design and modify
systems. This made their computing arrangements more
adaptable. Many organizations implemented PC systems with a
tacit social design that gave their workers more autonomy.

The next two selections by anthropologist Lucy Suchman and
computer scientist Andrew Clement give us some deeper
insights into socio-technical work design. In "Supporting
Articulation Work." Lucy Suchman examines the way that
critical work processes are often invisible to casual observers.
In a telling examples that appears in the middle of her article,
Suchman contrasts the way that lawyers and legal assistants in
a firm view the work of coding legal documents with "objective
categories" such as From, To, and Date. The male lawyer
viewed the coding task as mindless, work that could be done
"by chimpanzees" or "by 9-year olds." The lawyer viewed legal
interpretation as mindful work. In contrast, the female legal
assistants showed Suchman that the tasks of identifying which
set of papers should be considered as a document, which
names on the papers should be labelled as To and From, and
which date should serve as the documents' official date all
required mindful interpretation. Suchman notes that it is
common for male workers to create artificial categories, such
as mindful/mindless or hard/easy to create status boundaries.
She goes on to describe how she and her research team
developed a prototype document imaging system whose key
features were based on the document coding task as
experienced by the coders.

In "Computing at Work: Empowering Action by 'Low-level
Users'" Andrew Clement describes how several different
groups of clerks participated in the design of computer systems
in their work. The opportunity to participate was not
generously initiated by upper managers in any of these cases.
In the case of the Manitoba (Canada) Telephone System
(MTS), managers developed a "pervasive command and
control culture in which (mostly female) operators were ...
constantly watched over and punished for every infraction of
the rules." In 1986, operators began reporting health problems,
and even stopped work in one office after they became
frightened of unsafe working conditions. A Canadian health
authority and the clerk's union helped negotiate the
opportunity for redesigning work in a Trial Office" with upper
managers. Clement reports the resulting change that "operator
services have been reorganized around smaller, multi- function
work groups while several of the innovations first adopted by
the Trial Office e.g. elimination of remote monitoring,
improved training resources, cross training, unlimited rights to
trading shifts, greater discretion in responding to customer
queries are being extended throughout MTS." Clement
describes two other projects in a library systems and in a
university administration which clerks were able to convince
upper managers to allow them to redesign their worn work
and computer support systems. He notes some important
commonalities in these cases:

For all the differences between these three cases in terms
of the jobs, technologies and organizational setting, there
are striking similarities. In each, women office workers
faced unnecessary hardships because of conventional ways
in which computerization had been imposed on them.
They had not been consulted about the introduction of
the computer systems in the first place, and initially tried
to accommodate to the new conditions, in spite of
experiencing considerable adverse effects - effects that are
commonly associated with the negative implications of
computerization elsewhere. Coming from the lower
reaches of rigid, strongly hierarchical organizations,
attempts to voice concerns were met with fates typical of
bottom-up initiatives. It was only after pressures for
change had grown considerably was any action taken.

The high side of these "participatory design" projects was that
the clerks in each of these organizations were able to create
more productive and less regimented jobs for themselves.
These kinds of working conditions are sometimes taken for
granted by higher status professionals.

In a more recent paper, Andrew Clement and Pater Van den
Besselaar (1993) examined the results of many participatory
work-redesign design projects. In many cases specific projects
lead to participants improving their understanding of
information technologies and effectively proposing new or
altered systems that improved their working conditions.
However, many of these projects were relatively short term,
and most of them were isolated examples within their larger
organizations. Participatory design is a fundamentally
controversial approach because its advocates forthrightly
question traditional lines of authority and typical assumptions
about who has expertise in organizations.

A third approach to social design is congruent with both
business process reengineering and socio-technical design: web
analyses of computing infrastructure (Kling, 1992). One key
insight of this approach is that social designs which focus
primarily on the overt work system, such as processing an
insurance claim or installing a phone line, can overlook the
kinds of systems and support which are critical for making
computer and communications systems workable for people.
For example, in a study of computing and organizational
practices in a large number of leading companies, McKersie
and Walton (1991:275) observe, "Despite widespread
recognition among IT planners that most systems are
underutilized because of inadequate training, the deficiency is
repeated in systems implementation after systems
implementation." Training is only one element of infrastructure
for computing support. Web analysis locates computer systems
and people who use them in a matrix relationships with other
people, organizations and technologies on which they depend.

Computing infrastructure can play a key role in social designs.
A group may prefer a high performance computing application
which requires substantial training and consulting, or a
medium performance application which people may learn
more effectively on their own. Whichever application is chosen
makes subsequent demands upon computing infrastructure for
those work groups. Organizations often fail to realize the gains
from IT that they hope for when they: a) select high
performance applications and fail to provide needed support
or training in their use; or b) select lower performance
applications but still do not encourage people to experiment
and learn in their workplaces. My case study of
computerization in a research team (Jewett and Kling, 1991;
Kling, 1992) illustrates how a Natural systems model of
organizations is needed to understand what kinds of
infrastructure are feasible for specific work groups and work
systems. This case was specially complex because the work
groups' computing facilities, including PCs, printers, and e-mail
systems, were administered by several different organizations
and located in dispersed locations.

Computing practices can be very complex in practice. It is one
thing to say that you computer network has a high speed
printer, and another thing to use it effectively when it is
located 1/2 mile away or in an office which is often locked
when you work. I know of remarkable examples in which
people who worked in hi-tech organizations forwarded e-mail
and files via the Internet to their spouses who worked 20 miles
away so they could get printed copies within a day. Printing
messages and files that they received over their networks
proved to be elusive in their own organizations! It is easiest for
us to imagine that someone who uses e-mail can routinely
attach files, print messages, file copies of inbound and
outbound messages in special folders, send messages to groups,
and so on. It is remarkable how many e-mail systems are
configured in ways that make these seemingly routine activities
cumbersome or virtually impossible for many men and women
who use them.

The analysts who facilitate social designs use tacit models of
organizational behavior. Business process reengineering often
rests upon Rational Systems models. Since one overt goal of
many of these projects is reducing the number of people
employed in an area (often referred to as "downsizing" or
"decapitation"), it should not be very surprising that the people
who will do redesigned work are often unenthusiastic about
sharing their best insights with designers. Natural Systems
models of organizations take much more explicit account of
people's social behavior (such as seeking occupational security,
careers, and specific kinds of economic and social rewards
from work). Natural systems models also underlie many of the
socio-technical design projects.

Conclusions

During the next decade organizations will continue to
computerize work--automating new activities and replacing
earlier systems with newer technologies. The controversies
about how to change work with computer systems will continue
to have immense practical repercussions. This article identified
some of the key controversies that pervade this diffuse
literature--those that pertain to gender equity, control,
support systems, social design and new ways of organizing
work. Many of the controversies are implicit, since authors
often take positions without carefully discussing the alternative
positions and debates.

Further systematic research can help resolve some
controversies, such as the possibilities of effective social design,
the conditions which engender new forms of work
organization, and the extent to which they create higher
quality workplaces. However, these controversies also pertain
to the concrete behavior of organizations, and questions about
what they do and will do, not just what they should do.

Organizations and workplaces differ and consequently, their
appropriate work organization technologies differ. The
research shows that no single logic has been applied towards
changing work with computerization. So key controversies
cannot be automatically resolved by a new kind of computer
technology, such as pen-based systems, or voice recognition.
New technologies create new opportunities, but do not always
require that the opportunities will be exploited, for better or
worse. For example, the research shows that few organizations
utilize fine grained computer monitoring systems as intensively
as critics of automated monitoring suggest. On the other hand,
relatively few organizations systemically and broadly exploit the
possibilities of more flexible work schedules that
telecommuting can provide. And it is common for
organizations to underinvest in the support for helping people
effectively integrate computerized systems into their work.

The choices of how to computerize involve practical judgments
about what makes workers more productive. But it also
engages managers's preferences for control, innovation.
Controversies over control pervade the literature about
computers and worklife. They also pervade numerous
workplaces. They entail controversies that have no inherent
resolutions. But good research can at least help men and
women at work in understanding the issues and some of their
most significant repercussions. After all, on a large scale, the
resulting choices will affect the lives of tens of millions of
people.

The practical situation is worsened when advocates of some
new family of technologies write as if all that has been learned
from the last 30 years of computerization is totally irrelevant
to help us understand how their systems can be integrated into
work or serve as a catalyst for reorganizing work. In this
article, we have criticized technological utopianism and
anti-utopianism as key genres which inform many normative
accounts about how organizations should or should not
computerize work. We have seen a reliance on these genres in
a large body of professional writing about new families of
computing which are technologically discontinuous with past
devices. Expert systems, personal computing, groupware, and
networking have often been the subject of analyses which are
anchored in technological utopian premises. We expect to see
a similar body of misleading literature develop to characterize
new worlds of work with other exciting technologies, such as
"personal digital assistants."

A more realistic body of scholarly and professional analyses
can develop in two ways. First, if analysts are willing to learn
from the past, such as the nature of control issues in work and
the importance of infrastructure and social design, in their
relentless search for a better future. And, second, if the
technological community is willing to devote some resources to
sponsor serious empirical inquiry into the opportunities,
limitations, problems of specific families of new technologies.
Despite the limitations of the current body of research, certain
perennial themes recur. While there are many important and
open research questions, there is a body of good research to
help inform better choices now.